Tag Archives: marriage

Syndicated columnist Mark Steyn wrote an essay on gay marriage which added an important element to my view on the subject. I sent the following letter to the editor of my local paper, the Orange County Register, in response. My basic premise is that technology, while making life easier, is also removing the human element from our culture.

Letter to the Editor OC Register 4/1/13

Re Mark Steyn’s essay of 3/31/13 “Downward mobility in the age of fairness”

Mr Steyn makes a lot of sense in his well-written (would that I could write so interestingly) essay. Marriage has become a side dish in American culture which marches relentlessly into the technological fog while shedding one by one the organic organs that make it human, marriage being one of these. I don’t know what this country will look like in the next few generations with Microsoft and Apple in the driver’s seat. How do I connect these two behemoths with the institution of marriage? I’m not too sure exactly except that technology, which is inevitable, has taken over and the sacred relationship: marriage, is drowning in its wake. Technology is creating a mad scramble for the “machine” that will solve all our problems and marriage has become a problem. So why not change its parameters? Expand its scope and meaning. Move from the pen to the keyboard. Make marriage an “unproblem” by fitting it into the vast motherboard of ons and offs, ones and zeros. Take out the sacred to make it fit. Take it down a notch or two, or ten.

Mr Steyn changed my mind today. Until I read his essay I thought: “Why not include gays? Don’t they have the same rights as heteros?” The answer is of course they do. But are their unions sacred? Do they further or retard cultural humanity? There is no way to stop what is happening. The Supreme court will not and cannot stop what is happening. Just as divorce has become common place, so will gay marriage. The sacred will lose the war with its enemy technology. And what makes people human is dying with it.

My husband has died a casket applied with fire collide death’s mist satisfied.

Thoughts of him brew they cook and they stew rains came and storms blew for years these I knew.

One morning a sun warm days now begun life’s strings I can strum my heart starts to hum.

Betrothed no more stand at the door feet on the floor light shines afore.

My soul feels him still and wants with a will that marches the drill of love’s easy thrill.

But now is my time the present is mine a future is prime and all comes out fine.

(9/21/10)

My husband died from an aortic dissection at a young age (the inner wall of the artery over his heart broke), and every September on the pier at sunrise I write at least one letter to him in my journals on my life so far. In 2010 I wrote letter after letter until this, my first poem, came on the 8th anniversary. I felt like the poem did not come from me, but wrote itself. I get the feeling of marching when I read it.

Life as a sandwich generation x’er, stacked with irony. As a ‘normal’ person peering out from the boundaries of suburbia, as a transplant from another state, maybe another planet. As a mother of teenage boys and freelance working writer balancing parenting with helping to care for my mother. And now as an only child of a mother with Alzheimer’s (which sucks).